L.S. Harvey – her pen name – was diagnosed with a white blood cell cancer called Hodgkin’s lymphoma just before her 25th birthday.
During the two years of treatment and recovery which followed, the now 27-year-old started writing The Scaena Show – a dark thriller novel about a fashion store which skins its customers.
The book was published in October last year and has since been featured in Heat and Bella magazines.
Ms Harvey, who teaches English at Marshalls Park Academy, told the Recorder how writing helped her to “hold on to” her identity after the “catastrophe” of a cancer diagnosis.
“When anyone is going through that sort of catastrophe, especially at such a young age, there becomes this loss of identity.
“It’s really hard to hold on to who you are because your appearance changes – I lost my hair, my weight changed quite drastically.
“Having something like my writing to hold on to, which was always a core part of my identity, was really important to me.
“It was a tangible part of my personality which kept me grounded.”
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Appearance and body image are among the themes she explores in her “dark glamour” book, which she explains was partly inspired by her experience of working in a “toxic” retail environment when she was younger.
The novel, which gets five stars on Amazon, follows an orphan who thinks her dreams have come true when she is hired to work at a glamorous clothes store – only to find out that its customers are being skinned and made into fashion accessories.
Ms Harvey said: “When I was 16 I went to work at a retail store and it was absolutely horrendous, and the villains in the story are very much based on real people.
“Obviously this retail store wasn’t skinning people and making them into leather products, but it was just the environment being so toxic that I hated.
“I just then had to add the creative flair on the end.
“It [the book] is very much exploring ideas of power dynamics and oppression, and what lengths people would go to feel validated.”
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Ms Harvey added that, as a teacher, she sees the pressure young people are under to “fit a certain image”, especially on social media, and that this influenced the glamour element of The Scaena Show.
The English teacher’s colleagues have been supportive of her writing, with the news of the book’s publication shared on Marshalls Park Academy’s staff bulletin.
Students have also been “curious” about her work as an author, and Ms Harvey has been able to share her knowledge about the process of writing and publishing a book when teaching creative writing.
“This is really sweet – lots of the students will come to me with their creative writing, and want to share it with me,” Ms Harvey told the Recorder.
“They don’t want me to particularly do anything with it, they just want to be told that they are doing a good job and that I’m proud of them for it.”
Her message for anyone who wants to be an author is to not let writer’s block get in the way.
Ms Harvey said: “A blank page is the most intimidating thing.
“You have to write on the days even when you don’t feel like it, because you can’t just wait out a writer’s block and hope it goes.
“You have to write through it.”
